


Plus ça change...

by Morbane



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Rosanella - Anne Claude de Caylus
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Human Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:16:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In their competition for the position of Queen of the Fairies, Surcantine sees the challenge as an experiment. Paridamie prefers neatly tidied ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plus ça change...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anticyclone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/gifts).



> Thanks to afinch for checking over this.

"I will give your son everything," the fairy Surcantine promised her ally, King Agrelond, as they stood together looking down into the infant's cradle.

"Everything?" echoed Agrelond.

"Perhaps not," mused Surcantine. With mortal women and men, you never knew if they spoke exactly or inexactly, and in trying to use words in the roundabout way they did, she often made mistakes. Fascinating mistakes.

"What do you think would be left of he-whom-you-have-christened-Mirliflor, if I supplied every virtue he possessed?" She remembered her manners. "I didn't suppose you want me to - do you? You don't know who he is yet. You wouldn't miss him." The heir to the kingdom was only days old.

"I might miss him. Nanfelide would miss him," Agrelond said. How curious, that he was so sure. This was why he was her friend. He gave her so much to think about.

Surcantine obligingly resumed her topic. "Grace," she offered. "Health, strength, and good proportion, of course. Quick-wittedness; keen observation; charm. Agility."

Agrelond nodded. "The ability to inspire loyalty. Kindness."

"Generosity?"

"Perhaps not, unless you also give him prudence," said Agrelond. "But compassion. Wisdom?"

Surcantine frowned.

"I don't think a baby can be given wisdom," she said. Unless this were another shade of connotation of which she were unaware. Other things that humans named as single virtues were, of course, a mix of many - look at charm - but wisdom was a more complex blend than any she'd attempted. "Perhaps later in life. After he's learned to talk. I can give him languages," she said. "I'm very fond of your family. I will return. Different presents can be given when he is the right age for them."

The king looked wistful. "I've always wished I could whistle," he said.

Surcantine straightened up and kissed him, carefully and thoroughly. He stumbled back, seemed startled.

"Try now," she encouraged him.

She peered down at the boy again. Sleeping, with fat, clumsy fingers half-clenched. Such a strong nose, and such full lips. Human infants puzzled her. They were not at all like fairy children, who were cunning by instinct, and vicious if attacked. Humans were so vulnerable. It was as if they did not realise that now they had emerged into the world, survival was their first and core goal.

But even fairies could fail at that aim.

One lovely summer day, Surcantine was napping in the sun as a farm cat. She had spent this week’s animal day from one noon to another, and was considering staying in the shape a little longer - until the sun fell past the trees, perhaps - when another fairy appeared in the yard.

Ebreltia waited restlessly, feet tapping and head darting in a way that made Surcantine wonder if she had recently been a bird. The animal mannerisms lingered a little when one changed back. It was not her fault if, resuming her ordinary shape, she was inclined to loom over Ebreltia, and lick her lips.

“Surcantine, I have news,” Ebreltia said. “Queen Palaquira is dead. The fairy council meets to choose a queen.”

“So soon?” Surcantine asked. Palaquira was not well known to her; she set mandates, but the council performed most work of mediating fairy disputes.

“Of course not,” Ebreltia said. “In a year’s time, at the solstice. It was easy to find you, but not all of the others have your habits. I go to Paridamie next.”

“I shall seek out Celouane,” said Surcantine.

“And then I must find Farfallotte, and Gahalas,” Ebreltia said. If she had been a bird, her chest feathers would have been puffed up with importance. The cascades of lace at her neck, however, were still.

“How did Palaquira die?” asked Surcantine.

“She was a deer,” said Ebreltia, “a golden deer.”

“Ah,” said Surcantine. When she ran with the human hunt, as an animal, she always ran as a hound.

That was what Ebreltia meant by Surcantine's habits - she was fond of domesticity. If one must be an animal, why not a human animal? Sometimes she was even a beast of labour, and worked. Once or twice she had made the mistake of being a beast for slaughter, but even in animal form, fairies had resources. She had escaped, and learned better. And what did the other fairies learn from spending a day as a turtle, or a wasp, or a giant roc? Of course it was joyous to fly, or to swim, or to sting, or to run. But the novelty wore off. Humans were far more interesting to her.

Celouane was also a fairy of habit. Surcantine found her in a desert, a wraith drifting on moonlit sands. Something about the endless sands enthralled Celouane.

Now she had discharged her duty, and the year was free again. Surcantine travelled. She hid inside a library, and spent a day as a worm that ate at pages. She was a fly that buzzed at a gallows after a trial. She inspired a minor civil war.

“You’ve been busy,” said Ylflennar, one of the fairy council. He was admiring. Others found it harder to understand her desire to meddle in the human world. What she loved best to do was provoke a situation and watch it play out. It need not be violent, though the war had been fascinating. She might stage a phenomenon for a scholar, and observe as he attempted experiments to understood what he had seen. She might give a person a new skill, and then take it away. Perhaps she had been a little over-busy this year, as the absence of the Queen was an absence of governance.

Three score of fairies attended the meeting. Surcantine knew most of them, except for the very youngest, who must have been newly retrieved from her foster humans.

And here was Paridamie, approaching her with a look of delight.

“Are you not excited, Surcantine? Or honoured? It’s between us, of course,” she said. “No one else is nearly as suitable.”

“I am surprised,” Surcantine replied. She looked more closely at the crowd. Many of the fairies had come from fields, forests, deserts, or caves, and their features showed how parts of themselves had blended back into the world. She saw what Paridamie meant. The Queen of Fairies existed for human imagination, and human supplication. None of the other fairies present cared a whit for that.

But Surcantine did care for humans, in her way. And Paridamie cared for the way humans saw her; she loved their admiration and fear. Paridamie loved stories: arcs of pathos and wonder. While Surcantine buzzed at a gallows, Paridamie whispered a speech into the doomed man's ear. While cat-Surcantine napped in the sunlight, watching a farmer, fox-Paridamie led a brave youth on a quest to a golden key.

"A task is fairest," said Nydevre, senior to Ylflennar. "A human task."

"Yes, a task," said Paridamie. She fluttered with excitement. For now, she was the heroine of a quest.

"I shall create a princess who shall inspire all who know her to fall in love with her," she declared almost at once.

Surcantine supposed that that the achievement of such a task would be very useful to Paridamie in all her future endeavours. Her romances only need be doomed if she declared it so; she could turn affection on and off at will. Otherwise, such a wonder seemed limited in its use. And surely some variation had been done before.

For some reason, it was Mirliflor who came to mind. He would be three years old now. And so the individual informed her choice.

"I shall create a prince who is never constant," she told the council.

They nodded wisely, but the other fairies showed some puzzlement, and she was counting on this.

Fairies, as a rule, have a poor grasp on human inconstancy. They understand happy-ever-afters, and princesses locked away forever until a miracle, or a fairy, should occur. Fairies understand birth, and death, and cruelty, but not broken promises. They understand the way a river grinds down stone, and the way mud and grit accretes into a delta. They understand good and evil, but not corruption or redemption. In short, Surcantine, the scholar of human behaviour, believed she could convince her kin and colleagues that the task she attempted was far harder than it was.

Meanwhile, she had an idea for a most rewarding case study.

"I have come to fulfil my promise," she told King Agrelond, who sat examining patents and charters while his son played with his tutor a few feet away.

"To give my son everything?" Agrelond asked. He looked fondly down at Mirliflor. "I like to think I've started along that way myself."

"I will give him any virtue you like," she promised. "Any skill or strange perception. Except one."

"What is that one?" said King Agrelond; for she did not bother with the patronage of fools.

"Constancy," said Surcantine. "Well? Do you agree?"

"You could ask him, you know," Agrelond said, waving to the little prince.

"Oh," said Surcantine. Even she, who understood mortals best of all her colleagues, found some things hard to grasp. For example, the way that human children did not become adults in a single rite, but by degrees. The Mirliflor and Agrelond of this minute were different to the Mirliflor and Agrelond of the last. And the fairy council awaited an inconstant human as a marvel never before seen! Briefly, she wondered if she could convince them that she had not merely created  _one_ inconstant human, but had miraculously transformed all of the mortals of the world into this state (merely for the Queen's task). But practicality asserted itself. And the council were not fools either.

"Hello," she said to the little boy. "How would you like to be very funny? As funny as the Punch and Judy man?"

And so it went.

"I think it's better this way," said Agrelond. "He's had some time to develop a great deal of personality. I wonder, with infants, if all those gifts don't overwhelm them."

She observed that this time, he did not consult with Nanfelide.

Meanwhile, Paridamie seized upon a princess. "I brought her parents together, after all," she said. "I think it's in some way fair."

"Doesn't Queen Balanice notice?" Surcantine asked, observing the result of the princess's twelve-way split. "You even left the little birthmark on each of their throats."

"Oh," said Paridamie. "I suppose she would, but I didn't really let her. She was so confused about it all. Anyway, she's not the task, so it doesn't really matter, does it?"

Surcantine had to concede that allowing or denying Queen Balanice comprehension of the process affecting her daughter(s) did not invalidate the challenge Paridamie had set herself. 

"I think I understand what you're doing," she commented. "By separating out Rosanella's twelve major virtues into separate personalities, you're developing each good quality in far greater depth than would generally be possible. I wonder: if you did that with a hundred virtues, perhaps you could create the puzzle pieces of a perfect human."

Paridamie smiled.

Mirliflor, too, grew. She visited him often, at any such time that she thought of a new virtue to grant him. She observed with pleasure the result of her guidance. Mirliflor broke promises, but he was so charming and noble that all forgave him. He was not loyal, but could frequently convince any observer that the change in his behaviour was due to a higher principle from which the previous loyalty derived. He was not predictable, but he was dazzling. He was everything but constant - and there was nothing constancy could give him that he could not achieve another way.

"If he  _wanted_ to be constant, I'm sure he could," Surcantine remarked proudly to Agrelond. "It only requires that he develop the habit. But why would he?"

"What if we encouraged him to?" Nanfelide asked.

"Oh, please don't," Surcantine said. "That wouldn't be fair."

"It wouldn't count as fairy interference," said the queen. "Only as a human inclination."

"I really wish you wouldn't," Surcantine said, putting emphasis on  _wish_. She cajoled, "And isn't he happy as he is?"

The notion that these two projects encounter each other was an out-of-the-blue idea proposed by Paridamie's friend Revanchesse. Surcantine realised later that she should have been more suspicious, but at the time, it seemed harmless. Exposure of Mirliflor to another enhanced human would invalidate some of Surcantine's data, but the fairy council was taken by the idea, and it seemed wise to please them.

Mirliflor was charmed by every separate aspect of Rosanella. She watched with a little complacence as he flirted his way around them, so capricious and unpredictable that by the time he'd charmed each one, he seemed to have forgotten he'd already practised his flirtations on the first. 

"Did you intend to make them immune to love?" Surcantine inquired of Paridamie. "I would have thought  _some_ of them would fall for him."

Paridamie gave her an odd look. "They only have one twelfth of a heart each, Surcantine," she said.

Surcantine wouldn't have thought that was a problem; many ordinary mortals seemed to survive on less.

Mirliflor's reaction when Paridamie withdrew her princess(es) was a genuine shock to Surcantine. She tried to see it as a useful crisis; a sterner test of her hypotheses than any that had gone before. But as Mirliflor continued in despondency, she found it hard. She was afraid she'd lose him, her beautiful prince in whom she'd invested so much time and care. 

"I'd even make him constant, you know, if that would help," she said grimly to Revanchesse.

"Don't worry," Revanchesse said. "I don't think it'll come to that."

The second shock was not when Mirliflor proposed marriage to the returned, reconstituted Rosanella, but when the fairy council ruled on that fact.

"But this proves nothing," she tried to tell them. "Human beings fall out of love! They betray! They  _regret!"_ She'd honestly thought the test would last for the humans' lifetimes. And even in that case, the test would have been weighted towards Paridamie's project, because Rosanella might enchant anyone who saw her, but Paridamie could not test the reaction of every human in the world on Rosanella.

"I was too clever for myself," she complained to Ylflennar. "I lost  _because the council doesn't understand inconstancy_."

"No," he said. "That's not it. I'll show you."

He led her to the grove where Mirliflor and Rosanella sat together, talking quietly.

"It's so confusing," the princess murmured. "All these memories from different angles, and they never quite add up. But where my memories are fractured, you hold them together. You were always there. You're my constant, Mirliflor."

"Oh," said Surcantine.


End file.
